Janitors play a vital role in Glasgow’s schools, maintaining the grounds and buildings and keeping them safe and secure. The janitorial service is run by Cordia, one of the arms-length companies (or ALEOs) wholly owned by the Council. Cordia have proposed a ‘cluster model’ for primary schools and nurseries that instead of ensuring one janitor per school would provide three or four janitors to support six establishments within a geographical area, or five or six janitors to cover eight.

Green Councillors in Glasgow are looking to capitalise on the £17m extracted from the SNP by Green MSPs in Holyrood with their budget proposals for the city, including the protection of local services and radical new transport plans for the city.

Glasgow’s Green Councillors will push to reverse planned cuts to community safety, school janitors and sheltered housing as Glasgow City Council meets to discuss its budget for 2017-18.

In Glasgow, our Green Councillors have been very active on tackling air pollution and agree that the level of air pollution, and in particular the fact that pollutants in Glasgow are breaching legal limits, is unacceptable. Green councillors view this as a public health emergency.

Green Councillors have consistently urged stronger action to tackle air pollution since being first elected to Glasgow City Council, including supporting the proposal for a bike loan scheme way back in 2008.

All too often immigrant communities in the UK are blamed for government decisions to cut services. Government at all levels has a responsibility to adequately fund and plan for hospitals, schools and housing. We cannot simply take the financial benefits of migration without having more effective policy in place to facilitate integration. It is not acceptable that immigrant communities are blamed for poor planning and government cutbacks. This is also to the detriment of the global community and environment and is visible through the rise of the far right in Europe and the U.S.

Over the past few weeks I've been talking to residents about plans to demolish the Old College Bar on High Street to make way for a block of student flats. While gathering signatures for my petition, I have spoken to enough enthusiastic signees to demonstrate a real concern, not just of cultural heritage being ripped out of Glasgow, but also about the short-term, poor-quality architecture that we often see replacing it. Many people are jaded because of a lack a voice with which to influence decision-making, particularly in the planning process.

The human cost, the sheer human cruelty, of the moves to close half of Glasgow’s jobcentre were chillingly related to us before we set off on Monday on the second of our Scottish Green Party walks to highlight the reality of these Tory cuts.

Despite all the uncertainty of global politics and economics, a citizen’s income could help us Glaswegians regain some control in 2017.

In many ways 2016 was a bad year for progressives. Welfare cuts, unfair work conditions and food banks remained; attitudes hardened towards refugees and immigrants; and right wing populists won the vote over Brexit and the White House. But, behind all of this, 2016 was also a year in which those wanting a more economically just, open and equal world also made their mark.

This morning I walked from Bridgeton Jobcentre to Shettleston Jobcentre. Bridgeton, together with Parkhead, are two of the seven Glasgow Jobcentres the DWP proposes to close, with claimants attending these two centres being transferred to Shettleston. As the Green candidate for Calton, the ward which covers both Jobcentres, I find these proposals extremely worrying. The further away a job centre is, the more difficult it is for people to get there to claim the benefits to which they are entitled, and to get assistance and support to find work.